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On 9 November 2016, Donald Trump won the electoral college both on the strength of and in spite of a campaign built upon bigoted, misogynistic, and racist rhetoric. In response, AntiBookClub—a small independent publishing company operating under a progressive, reformist platform—released an “open letter” to Penguin-Random House directly urging the company to stop representing Trump. In an eloquently stated passage, the letter advises:

As an influencer in the publishing world, your continued financial support through the sales of his book sends a message to your readers that you condone his racism, his misogyny, and his contempt for people of different nationalities and religions.

Behold the first sentence of the foreword of Kari Kallioniemi’s book, Englishness, Pop and Post-War Britain:

“As this book will suggest, imagining England from the outside, from the point of view of a foreigner and through pop music is both a strange and familiar feeling of Anglophilia, inviting me to construct such a highly contested subject as pop-Englishness—ambiguously associated with the precious sentiments that ‘only England know.’”

“Oz” is a morpheme for Australia. Many know it to be an oblique nod to the other “Oz”, the fairyland setting of Frank L. Baum’s children’s classic. That connection could have had its genesis in Ozma of O” book No.3, published in 1907.

When would-be folksinger Rachel Boucher is raped and impregnated by former high school crush Jason de Klerk, the ensuing custody battle tears apart Athens, Ohio. That the aimless, unemployed de Klerk would have any parental rights at all is only part of what puzzles in Rachel’s Blue, Zakes Mda’s deeply peculiar novel.

Rachel, 23, is a would-be folksinger and nascent activist who lives with her grandmother, Nana Moira.The “Blue” of the title refers to the Amish ragdoll Rachel remains oddly attached to:

When everyone was gone, Blue was the one to have stayed. There was Nana Moira, of course, but she didn’t count that much. Blue, on the other hand, was always with Rachel. She was not apt to die in a war or disappear in a fog of drugs.

His rise to fame was spectacular but brief; as the lead in Berry Gordy’s deathless, runaway cult hit The Last Dragon, Taimak delivered audiences a character whose slash and burn approach to the martial arts was strangely offset by his quiet, unassuming charm. In Bruce Leroy, Taimak created an anomaly of personalities, housed in an individual who became emblematic of the contradiction to black stereotypes in film presented at the time.

The year of the film’s release, 1985, came and went. And it seemed that Taimak did, too. What should have been a meteoric rise to fame was, in fact, a quickly extinguished flame.